A Twin Cities builder's remodeled 1953 house in Minnetonka now glows with the copper sheen of wall-to-wall pennies — 51,000 of them laid tails-up in a guest bedroom, and 46,000 laid heads-up in the office.

Today, it's hard to tell where Renee Allen's garden ends and Sheryl Hybert's begins; both women have filled the boulevard and just about every inch of their front yards with plants. "That's the cool thing — gardens bring people together," Allen says.

Building a big house as a new retiree isn't the norm. "Once you have grandchildren, you want places that work for them — where they can slam doors and throw things on the floor," said grandma Jackie Chase.

An Eisenhower-era rambler in St. Louis Park was crying out for a makeover, telling its remodeling designer what it wanted to be — clean-lined, simple and quiet, like a midcentury modern Scandinavian home. You can have it for $550,000.

Members of a Minnesota family say living in a tiny house has allowed them to live on one income, home-school their kids and "instill amazing values — valuing experiences and time together over stuff we store in our house."

If you love gawking at ritzy real estate, June is your month. This year, though, you won't have to choose which tour of swanky high-end houses to attend. The Artisan Home Tour, sponsored by the Builders Association of the Twin Cities, is the only one.

Baseball great Kirby Puckett and his family retreated to their Wisconsin getaway home for fishing, fun and precious privacy. "It really felt like our own world," his wife then says. You can have it for $1 million.

It's the end of an era on Lake Minnetonka, as modest vintage houses increasingly make way for bigger, grander ones. Their elimination is dramatically changing the character of the Twin Cities' largest lake. "It's the rise of the McMansions," one critic says.

When a hands-on couple decided to build a new home on their Medford farmstead, they dug up their plants and rebuilt the garden, too. "Hundreds of plants … hostas … daylilies. Any perennial I had, I moved," Cyndi Maas said.

His all-white condo in a 1970s-era building didn't have much character or personality. So he began adding flavor — not merely "decorating," but using his plain-white surfaces as a blank canvas for creating art.